Quote Originally Posted by bokchoykn View Post
Vengeance can do quite a bit of damage over its 15 second duration. Its only 12.5% uptime, but every bit counts. Especially when you're getting hit by two Gaolers with Maim, Unchained and Berserk up.
The enemy auto-attack is something like once every 2.5-3 seconds or so, which means that Vengeance provides an extra 250-300 potency per target per use. Since we're not talking AoE (where WAR is obviously king due to Overpower and SC actually dealing damage), you're talking about getting an extra 5.21-6.25 potency/GCD is you're using it on cooldown (and you don't dodge any attacks and the target doesn't use any magic attacks; since Vengeance is the strongest WAR tank CD, you'd be an idiot to use it on CD just for damage). Given that a WAR can expect to deal roughly 375 pot/GCD, Vengeance on CD is going to provide you with a 1.38-1.67% increase in damage dealt.

Vengeance provides a more substantial increase to damage over the short term than it does over the long term. Over the course of a long fight, when you're using it as a tank CD rather than a damage mechanism, its contributions are virtually unnoticeable in practical/observable terms. The only time I actually use it as a pseudo-DPS CD is at the start of combat to benefit from the Wrath stack so that I can unleash Unchained>Berserk>IR 2 GCDs earlier than I would otherwise while getting an extra ~50 pot/GCD for the opening.

Don't discount the crit bonus from Wrath stacks or Internal Release. These are tiny buffs, but again, they add up.
I factor those in. Using Unchained and Berserk every 120 seconds, using IR every 60 seconds (one stacking with Unchained and Berserk every 120 seconds), and assuming a ~7.5% average +crit from Wrath over time amounts to the nearly the same proportionate increase in damage as Fight or Flight (10% increase in damage over time). Fight or Flight is just *that* strong (in fact, it's the strongest DPS CD in the entire game; a lot of people who think that PLD deals terrible damage are those that don't use it every time they can).

So, while PLD DPS in Sword Oath is roughly equal to WAR DPS w/o Defiance, in real life scenarios, Warrior is going to outshine Paladin in the damage department in the long run.
That's why I said "roughly" equal. It's important to note that PLD has a crapload (silence, CD-less stun, Pacification, Cover) more utility than the WAR, which is where the damage inequality is made up from a balance perspective: WAR has better damage, but PLD has better utility.

On a relatively interesting note, a PLD in Sword Oath running with a WAR without Defiance maintaining the SE debuff actually manages better DPS than the WAR since the gap between the two is less than 10%. The attribution gets kind of funky because you have to decide whether the increase in the PLD's damage should be credited to the WAR (since they're providing the buff) or the PLD (since it wouldn't be affecting a WAR secondary tank and the WAR would be applying the debuff for themself anyways), but it's something of an interesting little factoid to bring up, especially to those people that want to complain about PLD having utterly abysmal damage regardless of their state.